Hossein Samsami

Hossein Samsami Mazra'eh Akhound (born 1967 in Najaf) is an Iranian politician and institutionalist economist, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Shahid Beheshti University and a representative of the 12th term of the Islamic Consultative Assembly from Tehran, Rey, Shemiranat, Eslamshahr and Pardis constituencies. In 2008, he was the interim head of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance for a while, but he was not nominated to the parliament for the ministry. In 2019, he was appointed to the position of the deputy chairman of the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation.

Samsami has worked on the issue of exchange rates in Iran and defended his doctoral thesis entitled "A model for calculating the appropriate exchange rate during the structural reform of Iran" with the guidance of professor Mohammad Naser Sherafat Jahromi. Samsami has published several articles in this field. According to Samsami, the free currency market is a corrupt, fake market and a place of enemy influence, and until it is dissolved, the price will increase and there will be no stability in the currency market.

The most important economic idea of Samsami is that the price of the dollar is not real and hence he is also known as Mr. Cheap Dollar. He does not consider the dollar and other foreign currencies to be affected by the inflation rate like other goods in the domestic economy, and he does not accept that high inflation and low productivity in the use of resources lead to a decrease in the value of the rial, but on the contrary, he believes that the unrealistic price of the dollar leads to an increase in the inflation rate. Therefore, even though he was known as a fundamentalist and a critic of the Rouhani government, he seriously supported the method of calculating the price and taking action to implement the policy of allocating 4,200 Toman dollars (known as the Jahangiri currency). In several interviews, Samsami expressed his opposition to the attempt to remove this plan in the government of Ebrahim Raisi, who was forced to do it so after the shortage of foreign exchange resources, and considers this action to be the root cause of the increase in inflation in his government. In another similar approach, Samsami is against the plan of targeting subsidies for a fairer distribution of government subsidies, which was implemented in the fundamentalist government of Ahmadinejad, and says, "Our economy was wounded with purposefulness." Samsami introduced the payment of cash subsidy in this plan as a cause for the worsening of the condition of the poor after its implementation, and he considered the reason for this to be the inflation created by this plan, and rejected the Central Bank's estimate that its implementation only caused 5% inflation without presenting his own estimate of the created inflation. He does not accept the short-term and long-term anti-inflationary effects of this plan, caused by the increase in productivity, which was not included in the Central Bank's estimate. In a research, Samsami had predicted that with the implementation of this plan in 2010, assuming the stability of other conditions in the model of targeting subsidies with cash payment, the Gini coefficient would first decrease from 39% to 35% and then increase again to 42% in 2011. So, the net effect of this plan is to increase the Gini coefficient and inequality becomes more in Iran economic system. But in practice, despite the occurrence of sanctions against Iran in 2011, the Gini coefficient index continued its downward trend until 2014, and then the slope of its graph increased.